


The Mountains Eat People

by Iron



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - No War, Culture Shock, F/F, M/M, Night Vale-esque, Nyon - Freeform, Romance, The Mountains Eat People, Urban Fantasy, alien cultures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-07
Updated: 2017-11-07
Packaged: 2019-01-30 15:12:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12656031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iron/pseuds/Iron
Summary: Something evil slumbers beneath Iacon.Thunderclash dreams of the Ater Mountains, the slick black range that poisons everything around it, and a laughing mech wreathed in flames. When Hot Rod quite literally falls into his arms, he can't resist bringing the mysterious mech back to the city.Hot Rod, of course, is having none of this.





	The Mountains Eat People

Hot Rod sleeps against the white metal of the border wall. He recharges easily in the early morning light, when the sky is a soft dove grey and the screaming plains to the west have softened to a dull murmur. Beyond the wall he can see nothing but the endless broken ground and then the jagged mountains that ring the basin the city is settled in. The wall is a crumbling mess under his frame, which makes it both prime racing material and a great place to catch a nap before his shift. 

The sun climbs slowly across the sky. A little while after midmorning Hot Rod wakes up, blinking against the light. He checks his messaging suite, finds it empty, and contemplates going back to recharging. He doesn’t, but only because it’s too bright out now to fall back to sleep. He yawns and rolls onto his back, sitting up and stretching. He flicks his spoiler wings as he stands to chase off the last vestiges of recharge. The sky to his left is an unbroken blue all the way to the jagged oil-slick mountains, and to his right it ends butted up against the ancient mess of the city’s crumbled and shored up architecture. On boths sides the ground ends in buildings; squat where they have been allowed to sprawl across the ground, like scattered flecks of metal, and tall spindles where centuries of construction on top of construction have turned them into ramshackle skyscrapers. 

He turns to the left and takes a flying leap off the of the wall. 

If it were in good repair he’d be dead, sliding off the side of the wall without slowing down. Centuries of disuse had crumbled it, however, and the heels of his peds dig into the soft material easily, and he slows down before he hits the ground, tumbling straight into a roll to bleed off the rest of his momentum. 

“Nice ride!” Someone calls out. Laughter rolls out of the shadow of the wall, restless spirits amused by his antics. He flicks his fingers at the shadows and slides through the rough-cut neighborhood lying outside the wall. 

No that it’s much of a wall anymore. So many holes have been cut through it at this point that it acts more as a shoreup for the buildings on the inside of it than as any sort of border. 

He rambles through the twisting paths between the short, stout houses that occupy the newer parts of the city. The road signs are scattered chaotically along the roads, slips of green metal tacked to walls or hung from the dozens of street lights woven between the buildings. It’s too bright out to see the light, but they still cast whispers of cheap yellow on the walls of the buildings. 

The sounds of the city clamber and scream around him. In the distance he can hear the Werm caterwauling, and the dull humming tune of the white-eyed mechs that live beneath the city singing their morning hymns. A message comes through on his suite, and he changes direction slightly, heading more towards the rusted lake than the jagged crystal fields. 

Drift joins him on his walk out of the city. The swordsmech brushes his shoulder against his in greeting. “Heading out to the new pool?” He asks. 

“The council messaged me. I think we’re getting a bunch of new mechs coming through soon, this is the third one this month.” Hot Rod reaches the edge of the city proper, where there are only a few scattered storage areas and crystal gardens, and folds down into his altmode. He revs his engine once, twice, and then hears Drift transform next to him. He takes off suddenly, tires flinging up metal dust as he screeches towards the rust lake in the distance. Drift follows at his aft, just a frame length behind and to the left of him. 

Drift comms him. ::Slow down!:: He says, ::You’re gonna blow another tire.::

::C’mon, Drift, you’ve gotta live a little on the wild side.:: He laughs over the comm, speeding up until his tires skip over the loose crystal gravel of the ground. A turn at this speed will send him spinning out, or worse, rolling across the ground and into one of the cloistered gardens. 

He doesn’t care. Hurting through the wilds of the basin makes his spark sing, spinning faster in his chest. The gravel makes his axles ache, bruising his undercarriage, but he doesn’t care. ::Whoop! Gonna beat you there!::

Despite his warning, Drift is keeping pace with him. They take a turn around an outcropping of dark crystals, Hot Rod slowing to take the turn but Drift cutting his engine to glide through it. He pulls ahead, and Hot Rod chases his tail lights for a minute. He overtakes him quickly, racing past him as the crystals give way to the dead wastes, rough metal that blackens and grows slick under their aching tired. 

It forces them to detransform and trek their way through the jagged, oil slicked mountains. The black, slick oil seeps into the seams of their peds. It coats their protoform, burning slightly as they pull their feet clear of the muck. Their feet slide through the thick mess beneath the oil, sloughed off from where the acidic liquid had softened it. If they let it linger it will no doubt do the same to their legs, except to a far more painful extent. 

A muttered prayer to Primus negates it, and the hungry spirits living in the oil dissipate with the quiet gasp of a Unicronian banishment. Hot Rod kicks the worst of it free of his peds before continuing onwards. “This is the third pool this month, right?” 

“Second, I think. The reports came back that it was smaller than the last one, though.” 

“Right, whatever. Did you talk to your mechtoy about why it’s all green now?” 

“He said ‘we’re all cursed to walk through our lives wishing to return to a home that never truly existed, a poisonous nostalgia.’ So I think that means it’s copper or something.” 

“You’ve got to tell him to speak straight.” Hot Rod misses a step, ped pushing against a hunk of mushy metal that gives way under his foot and sends him sprawling face-forward in the murk. 

He sputters to clear his mouth. It tastes beyond foul; cloyingly sweet, like rusted metal, with an odd slimy texture that somehow spreads gritty across his tongue. He rolls over and sits up, sputtering. There’s an immediate ache in his denta, metal bubbling up inside his cheeks and across his glossa. Drift kneels down and shoves a bottle of solvents into his hand. He cracks the seal with a twist of his hand and takes one big mouthful to clear out the muck, swishing it around and then spitting it out. He does this until the taste is gone, nothing left but the bitter flavor of the solvents. He pours the rest of the bottle over his face, washing the muck from his helm and shoulders. Thinner rivulets roll down his plating, cutting through the thicker much. 

He crushes the bottle and tosses it aside, where it melts into slag after only a moment. Then he stands, shakes off the worst of the glopping oil, and turns to Drift. “This is terrible and I’m ready to go home, now.” 

“No you’re not.” 

“No, I’m not.” 

They continue up the mountain side. 

The sinking gets worse as they hike towards the coordinates of the new pool. The atmosphere chills, and they pull thermal tarps out of subspace and wrap them around their frames. Their venting release puffs of silvery steam as they walk, wisps rising off of their frames. The sun climbs higher into the sky, but they only grow colder. It’s the aching, unnatural cold of the lingering night, and the thermal blankets do little to help. 

A jagged rift, reeking of raw sentico metallica and thick, gloopy energon, yawns to their left as they approach a cliff. They look between each other, then at the rift. “That’s not something we want to go through,” Hot Rod says. 

“No,” Drift agrees. “It’s probably going to eat us.” They toe the ragged edge of the metal, and the tips of their peds come away coating in pink-black. 

“Well, we know the energon is there.” Hot Rod drags his fingers through the oil and energon mixture, feeling the hiss-bubble-pop of it against his plating. He sticks them in his mouth, the injured metal bleeding as it ruptures, numbed by the energon mix. He spits out the mess, bright blue and acidic, flecked with soft grey globs of his own metal. “That feels better.” 

“That’s disgusting.” 

Hot Rod runs his glossa over the inside of his mouth, feeling the smooth, slick sensation of his scoured metal. “Kind of.” 

They both duck into the crevice. Beneath their feet the ground writhes, alive and stinking, crawling up their feet. They have to rip themselves from the grasp of it, and each tearing motion pulls apart the ground. The color leaches from the bottom of their peds, where the color was already faded, until their peds are the color of platinum. 

It doesn’t bother them. 

The corridor within the mountain is thin, lined with the same reaching sludge as the ground. It slides over their helms and their shoulders, dripping, alive, sliding into their seams and coating their protoform. They hurry through it, but it’s slow going, forcing them to push through even as the wall scrapes layers of plating from them. “Are the prayers going to hold?” 

“Unless you stopped sacrificing to the Great Ion, then we should be.” 

Hot Rod hesitates, thinking for a second. 

“Please tell me you’re been doing your sacrifices.” 

“Haven’t you?” 

“I’m a Spectralist, I don’t _do_ sacrifices to the Great Ion!” 

“We’ll be fine!” 

“Hot Rod!” 

They both stumble into the suddenly-there cavern, air thick with the buzz of energy. A bubbling well-up of energon burbles at their peds, seething like an angry beast. Hot Rod steps up to it, grinning. “See? I said we’d be fine.” 

“That’s not what you said.” 

“It’s what I’m saying now.” He kneels at the edge of the pool, feeling the thick, wet tendrils subsume his peds and crawl up his thighs. The energon itself is heady, thick as pudding, with an energy content so high that Hot Rod can feel his FIM chip clicking on. He slides his fingers through it, dipping into the rich purple fuel, letting it sink into his plating. The oil slides off his fingers, leaving behind clean, white plating. He raises it to his mouth and licks it from his fingers, and it is clean and pure and it burns straight through his fuel pump. “It’s good.” 

“It’s too bad it popped up here.” He gestures to the cavern, and then to the tendrils climbing up their waists. 

“Yeah.” Hot Rod looks at the pool. “Step outside?” 

Drift cuts himself free in two easy slashes of his sword. The tendrils writhe and scream, bleeding hot blue energon across the ground, “Be careful.” 

Hot Rod watches him go. When the confirmation ping comes through his messaging suite, he grins, sharp as a knife. Fire blooms around him, yellow as the sky, and the air sings with heat. 

The energon does not burn. 

It explodes. 

\-- 

He’d been dragged to the mountains by a dream, of red flames and a flash of a smile and the black, bitter shape of poisonous mountains pressed against the shape of his mind. Now that they’ve reached the mountains, after nearly a month’s travel, he can feel the urge to cross them like an itch beneath his plating. 

Thunderclash keeps his eyes on the sky. “Can you see that?” He asks Skystriker, pointing towards the raging flames just beyond the peak of the Ater Mountains. It burns with the intensity of good highgrade. He’d seen a bar go off, once, when the bartender hadn’t been particularly careful. It’d burned like this, like light cast through a prism. 

Skystriker points to something tumbling down the side of the mountain, hurtling towards them and trailing black smoke. “What’s that? Something up there blow?” 

“Energon pool. I think that means we’re -” The place shape grows larger, closer, a jagged mass that quickly turns into a mech that turns into a mech without wings. Thunderclash is running before he can think, arms spread, ventilations hitching. 

The mech crashes into his arm, superheated frame burning his plating as he’s bowled over by his weight and velocity. He can feel it melting his plating to slag, but he holds on. “Skystriker!” 

His mech is well-trained, pulling the mech from his arms carefully and spreading him out on the ground. Heat dissipates faster that way, leaching into the ground. The mech himself is surprisingly whole despite his superheated frame. Their fumbling touches have even brushes the soot from parts of his frame, revealing a battered paintjob untouched by flames. The side of his helm is cracked, from his temple down the side of his neck, the finial of his cheek caved in and his optic shattered. His left shoulder pauldron is caved in, deep dents punched into his plating along his abdomen and legs. He won’t be getting up and moving anytime soon. 

It’s a miracle that his energon lines didn’t catch when he was caught in the explosion. Thunderclash assumes that it was because he was at the edge of the blast, though it doesn’t explain his superheated frame. The fire from the energon must be burning unbelievably hot. He casts a gimlet optic towards the Ater Mountains, far enough off that the ground is only just beginning to grow noxious beneath their peds. The mech must have flown miles to reach him. The fact that he hadn’t - that he bares no life threatening injuries, that he flew near enough in Thunderclash’s direction for him to catch - all too neat to be a simple coincidence. 

He looks towards the leering mountain range and the unknown lands beyond. Behind him he can hear his mechs racing through the hills, having heard the commotion. “Boss!” Someone yells. 

He hauls the mech up into his arms, turning away from the mountains. “We’re heading back!” He calls out. 

There are a few scattered cries, questions singing through the air louder as he strides towards them. “Why we heading back, Boss?” 

“Because I think I found what we came here for.” He cradles the mech in his arms, so light that he barely feels his weight, blackened by soot and yet still radiant, and he knows. “Primus sent me here to find his mech.” 

\--


End file.
